I’d like to announce that we’re officially starting a process of severing ties with our parent community FoCo Gaming and starting a journey towards being an independent community. This includes establishing back-ups for all of our services and moving our files and services over to new hosts in the event of failure or services not being renewed by FoCo Gaming, read more below for full clarification. This decision was unanimously made by the leadership and development teams in order to ensure a stable future for LS-RP.

We haven’t been able to establish contact with FoCo / Mow for roughly half a year now, as highlighted in this announcement. Since then, several of our services malfunctioned in places we had no access to, or expired completely, resulting in lasting, annoying issues. Examples of those are the forum downtime, mail server & two-factor authentication failures, loss of access points for the development team, ticket support site — the list goes on. While we found a way to get around most of these to find solutions that kind-of-work, the situation is getting progressively worse and forces us to spend an exhausting amount of time just ensuring our infrastructure holds up. This is a huge hit to our motivation and limits our ability to focus on productive and progressive development — that’s why we’ve taken a proactive stance.

The potential fallout of inaction from our side could mean loss of some of our key services, such as the game server, any of our boards and so on. Should there be renewed interest in LS-RP from FoCo Gaming, we’re open to negotiate a reversal of this decision if criteria ensuring safety of LS-RP services and assets are met.

The necessary downside of this transition would be a new domain name, so we’ll be switching from ls-rp.com to ls-rp.io fully in the event that ls-rp.com is no longer active. Please update your bookmarks in browsers and SA-MP client if you want to play it safe. The original domain name will still work for now and redirect you, but may eventually be fully disabled. If you visit the old domain, you’ll be prompted with a message to use the new one but it will still work. All occurrences of the old domain name in links across the boards will be rewritten automatically.

We expect occasional downtime on some of our services if we have to move everything to new servers, but we’ll inform you about those beforehand. Before any transition is made, we’ll be running periodical backups of all data twice a day, making your accounts safe in case of any domain / service expiration.

Additionally, as long as we still use FoCo Gaming’s resources (read: we aren’t fully migrated to our own servers), all donations will continue to go to their paypal account, and we’ll switch that once we’re fully on our own (if there's a catastrophic failure and current hosts are not renewed) and all legal formalities have been taken care of — the migration and backups are funded by me personally.

All in all, to everybody here, there should be no noticeable change to the community except the new domain name. Once we are fully migrated, everything will operate normally and our services will continue to run — more smoothly, in most cases. We do have exciting plans for the near future as this only opens up new opportunities, but this doesn’t change anything in terms of LS-RP structure or its staff.

Any future updates tying to this, or messages about services being moved / updated will be posted on this topic.

If you have any questions, feel free to message either Mmartin or Surreal.

Update: The server running our forums and some other internal services expired last night. I was able to recover a recent backup (with a few hrs of rollback) and install the forums on a server we purchased when creating this announcement...

The game server, which runs our SA-MP instance and the website (ls-rp.io) is due to expire on the eight of April, if that goes down too, we are left with no choice but to migrate everything remaining to new servers.

That being said, the .com version of the forum domain will no longer work. I'll look into automating link rewriting in existing posts, for now if any of your links are broken, just change the forum.ls-rp.com domain to forum.ls-rp.io

Update on last note: All forum links in forum posts and forum descriptions have been changed from forum.ls-rp.com to forum.ls-rp.io. Everything should be clickable now. If you find a link that doesn't work, please shoot me a message and I'll look into it.

Update: The server running our status page (status.ls-rp.com), development environment and other tools expired early this morning. I'll look into resurrecting the status page elsewhere once I'm home from work later tonight.

In regards to the forum discord bot, unfortunately I didn't have it backed up when the server that hosted our boards expired. I changed the permissions to our #main channel so it's open for everyone, and created an invite link so anyone can join without a verification process: https://discord.gg/MXhckSX

Services that are still susceptible of going down in the near future are: the game, website (April 8th, should nothing change), TeamSpeak, lsgov (be ready for a switch to lsgov.io, should that happen), faceinvader (I own the domain for that one, so no change expected there, however it doesn't have to come back right away. It's pretty expensive to run and it might only be viable to bring back when [and if] we switch the donations paypal). Besides the game and website, there's no estimate for the time they might go down, it could be anytime. We keep backups though, so in a scenario they expire, we can bring them up within a few hours (days, at worst) with a few hours rollback.

Update: The server that hosted our Teamspeak services (both the main one, and the legal factions one) has expired so you will not be able to connect to Teamspeak right now. Mmartin is working on restoring Teamspeak on a new server and will post when that has been completed.

- It seems that more and more servers went down, including lsgov.us. Adding to that, the game server expires in a few days. We'll be purchasing all necessary equipment to keep the services running with as little downtime as possible. Since there's only one foco server left running, that's due to expire in a few days, we re-routed the incoming donations and will use the proceedings to cover those expenses.

Edit: forgot to mention, you have to use the .io domain to connect to the TeamSpeak, so please update your bookmarks.

LSGOV
- Had a light tumble with our provider and the new equipment will have to wait til the weekend's over. I found some space and resources left on a different server we already had purchased and lsgov is now back under lsgov.io (including the sub-domains).
- The downside of this is that lsgov might function a bit slower than usually, due to being given limited resources.
- All links on the lsgov boards referencing the old domain (lsgov.us) will be re-written to lsgov.io later in the day, or tomorrow.

GAME
- Later today, we'll be making a move on the game server and the website to fully migrate them from .com to .io. Expect short downtime later in the day, precise time will be announced once it's ready.

The gameserver & web server have been fully migrated to the new server. We're now fully on our own, but expect occasional service downtime (mainly lsgov & forum) over the next week, as we tweak things for better performance and room to breathe. I'll try to do it in off-peak hours, so the majority's experience is not spoiled.

I'd also like to thank everyone who decided to support us during this trying time by either purchasing one of the premium packages, or mere verbal moral support. We appreciate it and we can overcome hurdles like these only thanks to you.

I'm aware there's a ton of dead links all over, I'll start looking into these tomorrow and over the following week.

FORUMS, LSGOV
- Forum & lsgov have been assigned their own server and will be moved over soon. There'll be a separate thread addressing any short downtime that might occur.

FACEINVADER
- A server with plenty of resources was purchased for faceinvader only, hopefully that'll address the slight performance issues it had. I'm going to be setting that one up soon as well. The issue with faceinvader's maintenance and staffing will be addressed in the future as well.